1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to systems and methods for user-computer system interaction and, more specifically, to systems and methods for time-multiplexing temporal pixel-location data and regular image projection for interactive projection.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many applications of user-computer interaction systems require tracking of a location of an object, such as user's smartphone. For example, a user may place his smartphone next to an item in a museum or a store in order to receive additional information about that item. The system tracks the location of the user's smartphone and uses the determined location to identify the item of interest to the user in order to retrieve and provide to the user the additional information about the item. A similar system may be used to enable user's interaction with a projected public display, wherein a user interface is projected on a surface. The user interacts with such a display by performing gestures using his or her smartphone.
In the above-referenced user-computer interaction systems, the location of the user's smartphone is determined using coded lighting generated by a projector. As would be appreciated by persons of ordinary skill in the art, to enable such a system to function properly, the projector must be registered with the real-life objects, monitoring camera, or other tracking systems.
For projected augmented reality and augmented worktables, researchers explored many different approaches to register projector with real world objects, monitoring camera, or other tracking systems. As would be appreciated by persons of ordinary skill in the art, to perfectly align the regular image projection system and the tracking system, it is advantageous to have the signal for position-tracking and regular image go through the same light engine. This approach can greatly reduce problems encountered during real system deployment.
For example, Lee et al. proposed unifying tracking and projection by introducing an infrared (IR) channel beyond visible channel in his projection system, see Johnny Lee, Scott Hudson, and Paul Dietz, “Hybrid infrared and visible light projection for location tracking”, In Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '07), ACM, New York, N.Y., USA, 57-60. However, this system requires a modification of the projector's light engine, which is expensive to perform in many commercially available projector systems. Moreover, the extra IR channel needs to be perfectly aligned with visible channels during light engine manufacturing process. As would be appreciated by persons of ordinary skill in the art, all these light engine physical changes will result in a significant cost increase of the light engine manufacturing.
Thus, new and improved systems and methods are needed that would provide a position-encoded image signal using a projector having the image generating light signal aligned with the light signal carrying the position information.